"Lochner v. New York" (1905) and "Kennedy v. Louisiana" (2008): Judicial Reliance on Adversary Argument
2011; University of California, Hastings College of the Law; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0094-5617
Autores Tópico(s)Criminal Law and Evidence
ResumoIt was Thursday morning, February 23, 1905, and Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller opened oral argument in a case destined to shape the course of American constitutional history. The Supreme Court’s calendar that day included a largely unnoticed appeal by Joseph Lochner, the owner of a small bakery in Utica, a city of about 63,000 persons in rural upstate New York. Three years earlier, the state had fined Lochner $50 for employing a worker for more than sixty hours a week in violation of the state’s Bakeshop Act, a maximum-hours law passed unanimously by both houses of the legislature and swiftly signed by Governor Levi P. Morton in 1895. By a narrow five-to-four vote, the Court reversed the bakery owner’s misdemeanor conviction. Writing for the majority, Justice Rufus W. Peckham held that the Act violated “liberty of contract,” an interest that a few Court decisions had found in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The constitutional liberty enjoyed by Joseph Lochner and his employees alike, wrote Justice Peckham, turned on whether the 1895 legislation was “a fair, reasonable and appropriate exercise of the police power of the State,” or whether the legislation was “an unreasonable, unnecessary, and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to
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